Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Fitzgerald was well suited for his final job, which lasted from August to October 1940: a film script based on Emlyn Williams’ stage play, The Light of Heart, about an alcoholic actor. But Fitzgerald’s screenplay was rejected and he was replaced by Nunnally Johnson, whom he had tried to warn about the dangers of writing for Hollywood. In May 1940 Fitzgerald had truthfully told Perkins: “I just couldn’t make the grade as a hack—that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.”5

  Fitzgerald also tried to help another promising writer, Nathanael West, whom he had met through S. J. Perelman in early 1939. Unlike Hemingway, who felt threatened by younger rivals, especially when they invaded his territory, Fitzgerald, even when his own career was in decline, was always kind and helpful to his colleagues. In 1934 he had included West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (along with Wilson’s I Thought of Daisy) in a list of “Good Books That Almost Nobody Has Read.” In his Introduction to the Modern Library edition of The Great Gatsby (1934) he pleaded for more generous book reviewing, made a favorable reference to West and said: “it has been saddening recently to see young talents in fiction expire from sheer lack of a stage to act on: West, [Vincent] McHugh and many others.” He also recommended West for a Guggenheim Fellowship that year, recognizing his talents and calling him “a potential leader in the field of prose fiction.” And in 1939 he wrote a blurb for the dust wrapper of West’s great novel, The Day of the Locust. Emphasizing the most effective scenes and the weird mood of the book, Fitzgerald said: “I was impressed by the pathological crowd at the premiere, the character and handling of the aspirant actress and the uncanny almost medieval feeling of some of the Hollywood background set off by those vividly drawn grotesques.”6 The day after Fitzgerald died, West was killed in a car crash near the Mexican border.

  II

  While struggling to survive in distant Hollywood, Fitzgerald tried as always to be a good father and husband. As Scottie grew more mature and independent, and Fitzgerald continued to criticize her during their infrequent meetings, she drew even closer to the kindly Obers. They lived fairly near Vassar and Scottie usually stayed with them during her school holidays. Fitzgerald had to play the strict parent while the Obers spoiled her. As he tried to stiffen Scottie’s backbone and get her to work hard in college, Anne Ober irritated him by buying her party dresses. He willingly gave the Obers parental authority and was grateful for their kindness, but also resented their usurpation of his role and criticized their efforts on his behalf.

  He admitted that he was often too nervous and too dogmatic with Scottie. In August 1939, just before her summer visit to Hollywood, he apologized (in a letter to Zelda) for apparently rejecting his daughter and for harshly telling her “that she had no home except Vassar.” But he defended himself by explaining that Scottie had actually rejected him: “When I tried to make a home for her she didn’t want it, and I have a sick-man’s feeling that she will arrive in a manner to break up such tranquility as I have managed to establish after this illness.” In late September 1939, when the college term was about to begin, he sent Scottie a pitiful telegram that was meant to make her feel guilty about what he had done for her: YOU CAN REGISTER AT VASSAR STOP IT COST A HEMORRHAGE BUT I RAISED SOME MONEY FROM ESQUIRE.

  When Fitzgerald confessed that he and Zelda had been bad parents and urged Scottie to reject their negative example, she seized the initiative, defended herself and spoke out publicly for her own generation in Mademoiselle of July 1939. “We feel we know what’s right and wrong for us better than our parents,” Scottie insisted. “The fact that we’ve turned out as well as we have is more to our credit than that of our parents.”7

  Scottie, not surprisingly, was deeply ambivalent about her parents: saddened about her mother’s emotional withdrawal and exasperated by her father’s misguided attempts to direct her life. She later spoke bitterly to scholars and friends, and published several essays about her unhappy relations with her father. “We never got along at all well,” she told Mizener, “except in letters (which have given everyone the impression we were a most devoted father and daughter).” Late in life she told an Alabama confidante that her childhood and youth had been extremely difficult, and that it had been hard to have a writer as a father: “I can remember nothing except the troubles of the 30s which were reflected in our relations: my mother’s hopeless illness, Daddy’s own bad health and lack of money and, hardest of all, I think, his literary eclipse. . . . In my next incarnation, I may not choose again to be the daughter of a famous author. People who live entirely by the fertility of their imagination are fascinating, brilliant and often charming but they should be sat next to at dinner parties, not lived with.”

  Yet Fitzgerald’s deeply moving Letters to His Daughter—edited by Andrew Turnbull and introduced by Scottie in 1965—did show his devotion to her. Though Scott and Zelda were unstable and unreliable, the very antithesis of conventionally good parents, they nevertheless gave Scottie—with the help of governesses and generous friends—the love and happiness that was necessary to develop and strengthen her character. As Scottie herself observed: “Daddy never let me feel the tragedy of mother’s illness and I never had a sense of being unloved.”8

  In his fiction Fitzgerald paid tribute to Scottie, who (like Zelda) inspired a number of charming characters: Daisy’s daughter Pammy in The Great Gatsby, the wise little girl in “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s,” Honoria in “Babylon Revisited,” Topsy in Tender Is the Night, Gwen in the four stories of 1935–36 and Cecilia, the Hollywood child and Bennington student who is hopelessly in love with Monroe Stahr, in The Last Tycoon.

  Zelda also tried, in her rare lucid moments, to be a good mother to Scottie. But their relations remained troubled during her daughter’s adolescence and teenage years. So Fitzgerald could not count on Scottie’s help when caring for Zelda. Despite—or perhaps because of—his guilt-ridden liaison with Sheilah, he continued to fly east to take the intensely disturbing but only vaguely therapeutic holidays with Zelda. In April 1939, after a particularly unpleasant fight with Sheilah, he impulsively flew across the country and took Zelda on a trip to Cuba. He had been beaten up while drunk and aggressive at Cottage Club in Princeton in 1920, in the Jungle Club in New York in 1921 and, worst of all, by the police in Rome in 1924. Though now forty-two, he was still remarkably combative. In Havana Scott fought with a cab driver, incensed that he could not speak English. In a sudden access of humanitarianism or confused heroism, he also tried to stop a local cockfight, which involved heavy betting, and was badly beaten up for his pains. After he returned to New York, he rounded off his horrible holiday by quarreling, on the way to Ober’s house in Scarsdale, with another cab driver who gave him a black and swollen eye. This trip was the last time he saw Zelda.

  The debate about the terms of her confinement continued to disturb Fitzgerald’s relations with the Sayres. In January 1939, three months before the trip to Cuba, he told his mother-in-law that it would be dangerous to let Zelda out of Highland: “Carroll says that if I take her away he will not take her back—he feels that I will weakly destroy his entire work of bringing her from a state of horror, shame, suicide and despair to the level of a bored and often grouchy but by no means miserable invalid.” Scott was afraid that he would be morally and legally responsible if Zelda killed herself or hurt someone else when she was out of the hospital. Nevertheless, Dr. Carroll finally changed his mind. In April 1940, after four years in Highland, Zelda was allowed to return to the rather run-down family house at 322 Sayre Street in Montgomery and to live with her eighty-year-old mother.

  Even before Mrs. Sayre assumed immediate responsibility, Scott began to find the strain intolerable and to withdraw from the woman who called herself a “middle-aged, untrained, graduate of half-a-dozen mental Institutes.” During a bout of tuberculosis in October 1939, he begged Zelda to “leave me in peace with my hemorrhages and my hopes.” And he bitterly told Dr. Carroll: “She has cost me everything a woman can cost a man—his health, hi
s work, his money.”9

  Scottie confirmed Fitzgerald’s remark by telling Mizener, in an important letter, that Zelda had destroyed Scott: “She was extravagant, yes, but that was part of her disease, and God knows she was an overwhelming egotist and probably a terribly tough person to live with on a day-to-day basis—and she probably ruined Daddy.” Even Zelda seemed to recognize the truth about their marriage when in 1939 she thanked Scott for all the sacrifices he had made during her mental illness: “I am always grateful for all the loyalties you gave me. . . . I love, always, your fine writing talent, your tolerance and generosity; and all your happy endowments. Nothing could have survived our life.”10

  III

  While his relations with Scottie and Zelda were deteriorating, Fitzgerald also quarreled irrevocably in July 1939 with Harold Ober, who had been his agent, adviser, banker and faithful friend since 1919. He had managed to pay off his huge debt to Ober during his first eighteen months in Hollywood. But when MGM failed to renew his contract, he began once again to slide into debt. In his Christmas card of 1937 Fitzgerald—who said he had paid his “bill collector” more than fifty thousand dollars in commissions for magazine stories—emphasized the difference in financial status between the wealthy agent, comfortably housed in Scarsdale, and the impoverished author, enslaved in the salt mines of Hollywood: “I recognized the dogs individually in your Christmas card. I’m going to have my suite photographed with the mice in the hall for next Xmas.”

  During the Depression Fitzgerald had depended on Ober to advance money (contrary to normal practice) for stories he had conceived and promised, but not yet written. By 1939, however, Fitzgerald had either failed to complete many of the promised stories or sent inferior work that Ober was unable to sell. Having paid off his debt, Fitzgerald thought his credit was still good. Well aware of Fitzgerald’s declining reputation and failure in Hollywood, Ober believed he would never recover his debt if he allowed it to pile up again. So he gave up on Fitzgerald and decided to cut his losses. On June 21, 1939, Ober wrote but—to spare Scott’s feelings—did not mail a carefully considered letter that stated his new financial policy: “I think, however, it would be a great mistake for us to get back into the position we were in. I think it is bad for you and difficult for me. The margin of profit in the agency business is very narrow. The expenses are many and high and I reckon the net profit is only about three per cent. I hope, therefore, we can keep things on a ‘Pay as we go’ basis.”

  Scottie later defended Ober, saying that he had discussed this matter with both Perkins and Scribner, who agreed with him, and then telephoned Sheilah to explain his decision and ask her to convey it to Scott. Despite Ober’s attempts to warn his client, on July 14 Fitzgerald asked for his usual advance on an undelivered story. And Ober was forced to telegraph a polite refusal: SORRY COLLECTIONS SLOW AND IMPOSSIBLE MAKE ADVANCE. Scott was shocked and furious about Harold’s disloyalty. He wrote on the telegram: “The insult to my intelligence in the phrase ‘collections slow’ makes me laugh,”11 returned it to Ober and decided to break with him.

  Fitzgerald, at first, accepted responsibility for this incident in a surprisingly clear-minded letter of July 18 to Kenneth Littauer, his editor at Collier’s: “Harold is a fine man and has been a fine agent and the fault is mine. Through one illness he backed me with a substantial amount of money (all paid back to him now with Hollywood gold) but he is not prepared to do that again with growing boys to educate.” But as time passed his resentment increased. He then reversed his position and began to blame Ober for what had happened. Writing to him on August 2, he portrayed himself as a drowning victim, whom Ober had been morally obliged to rescue: “I don’t have to explain that even though a man has once saved another from drowning, when he refuses to stretch out his arm a second time the victim has to act quickly and desperately to save himself. For change you did, Harold, and without warning.” It is unlikely, however, that Ober’s warning, if sent, would have discouraged Fitzgerald’s demands.

  Scott also complained to Perkins, who had urged him to remain with his agent, that Ober’s original interest in his works and forgiveness of his sins had now changed to a lack of confidence in his literary prospects and a general disapproval of his behavior. He also said that he had never been emotionally or intellectually close to Ober. Though Ober had witnessed his drunkenness and decline throughout the 1930s, in October 1939 Fitzgerald called him “a stupid hard-headed man [who] has a highly erroneous idea of how I live; moreover he has made it a noble duty to piously depress me at every possible opportunity.” Though Fitzgerald maintained his friendship with Perkins and Murphy, he had by mid-1939 drifted away from Edmund Wilson, become estranged from Zelda and Scottie, and quarreled with three of his closest friends: first Hemingway and Bishop, and then Ober—an essential ally.

  Fitzgerald earned $21,500 in 1939 but owed money for federal taxes, life insurance, Zelda’s hospital and Scottie’s college. After Ober dried up as a source of money, Scott was forced to borrow from Perkins, Murphy and his St. Paul friend Oscar Kalman. Trying to bolster the pathetic sales of his books, Scott bought all the copies he could find in Los Angeles and gave them away to friends. Almost everyone who writes about Fitzgerald mentions that during the last year of his life he sold only forty copies of his books and received a princely royalty of $13.13. But no one has noticed that his book sales were virtually the same at the end of the 1920s as they were at the end of the 1930s. In 1927, two years after he published The Great Gatsby, his books earned only $153; in 1929 they earned $32. Most of his income, throughout his career, came from magazine stories and screenwriting rather than from books.

  Fitzgerald found it extremely difficult to accept this painful fact. Toward the end of his life, when The Great Gatsby was dropped from the Modern Library because it failed to sell, he told Perkins that he felt rather neglected. He also asked his editor to salvage the remnants of his reputation by reprinting some of his earlier works. Speaking of himself in the past tense, he lamented his moribund career: “But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bear my stamp—in a small way I was an original.”12

  Fitzgerald’s failure and obscurity were driven home once again when Scribner’s published in October 1940 Hemingway’s long-awaited, highly acclaimed and immensely successful novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls. The novel was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, sold more than half a million copies in the first five months and was bought by the movies for one hundred thousand dollars. Fitzgerald was deeply moved when he received a copy inscribed, “To Scott with affection and esteem Ernest.” He carefully studied the technical aspects of the book and praised the battle scenes in a rather insincere letter to the author: “It’s a fine novel, better than anybody else writing could do. Thanks for thinking of me and for your dedication. I read it with intense interest, participating in a lot of the writing problems as they came along and often quite unable to discover how you brought off some of the effects, but you always did. The massacre was magnificent and also the fight on the mountain and the actual dynamiting scene. . . . The scene in which the father says goodbye to his son is very powerful.”

  But, envious of Hemingway’s success, Scott failed to recognize the greatness of the novel. When speaking and writing to friends, he condemned the love scenes—his own strong point. In his Notebooks he called it “a thoroughly superficial book that has all the profundity of [Daphne du Maurier’s] Rebecca”—which Selznick and Hitchcock had just made into an extremely popular film. And he told Schulberg, at great length, how the romantic encounters between Robert Jordan and Maria were “dreadful.” In The Last Tycoon he slyly mocked the most famous love scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls (“Did thee feel the earth move?”) when Kathleen says to Stahr: “When you do that, you can feel the earth turn, can’t you?” Scott told Sheilah: “It’s not up to his standard. He wrote it for the movies,” and complained
that his former hero, in his public pronouncements, “has become a pompous bore.” He also sent Zelda a more seriously considered judgment: “It is not as good as A Farewell to Arms. It doesn’t seem to have the tensity or the freshness, nor has it the inspired poetic moments. . . . It is full of a lot of rounded adventures on the Huckleberry Finn order and of course it is highly intelligent and literate like everything he does.”13

  Hemingway had come a long way from the humble flat near the sawmill in Paris, and their original positions were now exactly reversed. When they first met in May 1925 Fitzgerald was the well-established author and Hemingway was virtually unknown. By 1940 Fitzgerald’s reputation had disappeared while Hemingway had become the preeminent American novelist. After Scott’s death Ernest took steps to maintain his considerable advantage. He was conspicuously absent from the friends who paid tribute to Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up volume. In a series of fascinating letters to Mizener, he consistently denigrated his former and ever-more-threatening rival, and wittily remarked: “He had a very steep trajectory and was almost like a guided missile with no one guiding him.”